The Playstation 3: I'm Glad I Didn't Pay Money For This
by drrandle
I Received Home for the Holidays I recently received a PlayStation 3 for Christmas , completing my console collection. I'm only a few days into the PlayStation experience, and I have to say that I'm glad I didn't have to pay money for this. For starters, let's talk about what's in the box, or more to the point, what's not: an HDMI cable. I'm already paying a premium ( I pity the bastards who fo...
I Received Home for the Holidays
I recently received a PlayStation 3 for Christmas, completing my console collection. I'm only a few days into the PlayStation experience, and I have to say that I'm glad I didn't have to pay money for this.
For starters, let's talk about what's in the box, or more to the point, what's not: an HDMI cable. I'm already paying a premium ( I pity the bastards who forked over $600), for this sweet piece of machinery, and they can't even fork over an HDMI cable? The XBox 360 Elite managed to toss one my way, as well as composite and standard cables. All I got with the PS3 is the standard red, yellow, and white cords. That seems pretty backwards since Sony needs to get systems out into homes. What's the easiest way to do that? The same way they try and set up people with HDTV's at Best Buy: with the best possible viewing situation. When my parents bought an HDTV, they got this little package that set them up real nice; and the reason is so that when they have neighbors and friends come over, the company who made the TV wants them to see just how bloody good it looks so they will buy one was well. HDMI cords don't cost dirt to make, so there are absolutely no forgivable reasons towards not putting one in.
While I didn't have any games immediately, I decided to fork around and see what I could find on the network service. At least I wanted to, but the process of getting yourself up-to-speed on the console is painful and unintuitive. Setting up a PSN is no where near as easy as it should be, or at least as easy as it was on XBox 360. Also, all the work that goes into trying to do things like set up Remote Play is just obnoxious.
Home. Ha. No. Moving on.
I bought Eye of Judgement, which impressed me at Gen Con Indy a year and a half ago; plus it was only 30 bucks, with the camera, at my local Meijer. I went to get it started so I could show it off to my roomates, in hopes of getting them into the game so I'll have somebody local to play with, and found that the system needed to download some background updates. Sure, makes sense, why not. After about, oh, 4, 5 minutes, the updates were all downloaded. All 2500 plus files. But, it wasn't done, because then each one of those had to be initialized; a process that took, and I do not fucking believe this, over two hours. I used to get bothered when my PSP took a few minutes for an update when I just wanted to get into playing a new game, but over two hours before a: I could play the game I just bought or b: I could do ANYTHING with my PS3. What ended up happening? I played Animal Crossing for some of it, and then when it didn't finish, I just gave up and got on my computer, letting my roomate play Persona 4 on the PS2.
My point in all of this? Sony really needs to clean up their hardware. It's painful, and unintuitive, and if this generation is teaching us anything it's that other people outside of the core gamer realm want to play video games, too. I believe that having to navigate all of this bull with the PS3 is going to greatly diminish the number of people who get over the barrier.
Resistance is pretty fun, though.
-Make it a Good One.
Randy "Dr. Randle" Marr
PS: If anybody wants to, my PSN is DrRandle. Feel free to drop me a line or a friend invite.
PSx2: Sorry I've been quiet, I'll try and get some reviews out this week.